Talk:Christian mythology

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Lead and section on Christian attitudes toward myth[edit]

The problem with the removal of the paragraph removed today because it was already in the lead is that the lead shouldn't duplicate the article, it should summarize it. As it is what we now have is a section on Christian attitudes toward myth which doesn't discuss Christian attitudes toward myth and a lead which doesn't summarize the article per WP:LEAD. The paragraph should be restored to the section and the lead rewritten to summarize the article. It can mention the dispute without the sources as they should be in the section on Christian attitudes. The lead certainly needs to say something about types of myths. And isn't the modern period subsection actually part of the 'Legacy' section? Dougweller (talk) 21:25, 23 March 2014 (UTC)

Original research about heaven and mythology[edit]

The subsection of "Historical development" on the Old Testament has 3 apparently well referenced paragraphs. The new paragraph on Heaven is completely original research. We need secondary sources linking heaven in the OT with Christian mythology. Mining a primary source for references is original research. And neither Hawking nor Lennon mention mythology. I will be removing this again if it can't be properly sourced in the way the rest of the article is. Dougweller (talk) 09:36, 12 August 2014 (UTC)


Please explain reverting my ref after the second "citation needed" in that paragraph. The ref said:

Mentioned also in the 3rd paragraph of the article on philosophical and theological discussions on celestial spheres, where the following sources are referenced: Grant, Planet, Stars, and Orbs, pp. 382-3; Lindberg, Beginnings of Western Science, pp. 249-50. Scanned pictures of cosmography from books written 450 years ago are presented in the articles on Giordano Bruno and Celestial spheres.

and was placed just after "adapted their view...in the concept of celestial spheres". Do you perhaps deny the well-established and known fact of history or don't know how to source it yourself (even though you, as you said, read Hawking on this)?

Note that I'm not going to advocate that it is a long-lived and rooted in false ancient myths theory that the kingdom of heaven exists in this universe. This is a perfectly true statement but at the moment I have only secondary poor sources mentioning mythical nature of such cosmography in the Middle East (see also Panbabylonism), also I don't want to do OR by stating myself that it follows from the apparently mythical nature of the story opening the Book of Genesis (which nature is then already sourced in the article).

The only thing I did here was referencing 2 books and 2 pictures (already happily used in Wiki articles), as source for thesis about the Middle Ages continuing the (perhaps) myth, so why this removal. Have a look at last edit from my IP and its revert by your admin. Note that the ref was neither corrected nor left as-is (just restoring the "(more) citation needed") but silently removed. If Wikipedia is a credible source of information, that means its correctly sourced articles can be quoted as reliable source itself, no? 89.67.140.182 (talk) 12:20, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

I didn't see where Hawking discussed Christian mythology. Perhaps you can provide a quote please? And just fix the reference so it is cited properly. You are focussing on this article, I have a lot more on my plate. And there is no "your Admin". You are an editor, so there is no 'you' and I am not acting as an Admin here. Dougweller (talk) 12:47, 13 August 2014 (UTC)
Not that he used the word. Just noticed you read a quote from him yet still pretend sources mentioning the Catholic adaptation of spheres are unknown . will correct this,ok — Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.67.140.182 (talk) 14:39, 13 August 2014 (UTC)
89.67.140.182, you asked "If Wikipedia is a credible source of information, that means its correctly sourced articles can be quoted as reliable source itself, no?" Actually, it's no. There's even a shortcut to that point at WP:WPNOTRS. But if another Wikipedia article is correctly sourced, it should lead you easily to those reliable sources, which can then be cited in the current article, too.  Unician ∇  06:05, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

Bible verse citations[edit]

I don't know enough about the subject to know which ones to remove, but fifteen citations for "Jesus was portrayed in several books as going to return from Heaven on a cloud" seems blatantly excessive. I'd guess since part of the claim is "several books", any duplicate book citations can be removed. Is there a preference as to, say, which of the four different verses from Revelations should be used? 73.155.143.88 (talk) 19:02, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

Flood myth[edit]

The article currently attributed several flood myths to Christian mythology. Other that the Genesis flood narrative, are there any others? Also, this narrative derives from Jewish mythology and predates Christianity itself. Should this be explained in text?Dimadick (talk) 13:24, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

Table[edit]

I honestly have no idea where to start when it comes to problems with the table I recently removed with this edit. I suppose I will start with the basic format of the table. For one thing, it represents a patently outdated and simplistic nineteenth-century scholarly view of religions as progressing through a hierarchy from "animism" to "shamanism" to "polytheism" to "monotheism." It also treats different religious traditions as monolithic wholes, without recognizing how incredibly complicated and diverse these traditions are/were. It also makes bizarre and incorrect assumptions about how religions have historically originated by listing a specific "founding date" as well as a column titled "adapted from." All this makes it sound like religions are consciously created by a specific individual or group of individuals, who are intentionally reworking ideas from an older tradition. Religions do not develop that way, though; they develop like languages and cultures, evolving naturally and gradually over time with many different people playing important roles in shaping them. Furthermore, the "influenced by" column, once again, ignores the incredibly multifaceted dimensions of cross-cultural influence and makes it sound as though a religion can be described as only having one or a few "influences," when, in fact, even the cult of one particular deity almost always combines aspects derived from a vast number of other cultures and traditions. This column also fails to clarify which aspect of the religion in question was "influenced by" the other, or which group within the religion, since one group within the religion may be influenced without any of the other being influenced as well.

Finally, moving on to the specifics, almost every one of the specific details in this table is wrong or grossly oversimplified. The notion that people were originally "animists" in any real sense is entirely unsupported speculation; we have very little idea of what prehistoric religion was like, but surviving artifacts tend to indicate that, at least by the Neolithic, people were worshipping some kind of personified deities. The existence of a Nostratic language family at all is only accepted by a minority of linguists and there have been plenty of linguists who have dismissed the category altogether as unsupported by empirical evidence. The idea that the original speakers of a Proto-Nostratic language were in any sense "shamans" is, again, unsupported speculation. (Not to mention that the very definition of the word "shamanism" is also highly ambiguous, so it is unclear exactly what it would mean if they were.) The column for "Greek polytheism" lists "Egyptian polytheism" as the only influence, but the Egyptians were far from the only influence on the Greeks and they were not even the most prominent influence, since the Mesopotamian and Canaanites actually exerted far greater evident influence on Greek religion than the Egyptians. The dates given for all of these religions are also thoroughly arbitrary and inaccurate. (For instance, the date given for the "founding" of Judaism is given as 950 BC, yet Judaism actually developed over the course of the entire first millennium BC, as well as the first half of the first millennium AD. The dating of Gnosticism as a hundred years earlier than Christianity is just ridiculous, because any religious scholar knows that Gnosticism developed out of Gentile Christianity in the late first century AD and continued to develop well into the second and third centuries.

The idea that Judaism was influenced by Atenism is speculative and highly improbable, given that Judaism only became monolatristic towards the end of the first half of the first millennium BC and did not become monotheistic until even later and in Babylon. It is hardly conceivable that Jews of those periods would have had any knowledge of Atenism. Similarly, the idea that Christianity was influenced by Mithraism, despite its prominence in pop culture, is likewise highly dubious; we do not even know if Mithraism existed before Christianity and almost everything we know about the supposed similarities between Christianity and Mithraism comes from the writings of early Christian apologists who are well-known to have intentionally exaggerated similarities between Christianity and pagan cults in effort to show their pagan contemporaries that they were not so different after all and that there was therefore no reason for singling out Christians for persecution. Also, I do not know whose decision it is that Islam was "adapted from" Judaism, but only "influenced by" Christianity. It was quite clearly greatly influenced by both, not to mention countless other influences such as Manichaeism, which is not even listed here.

This is honestly just the beginning of problems with the table. The only source provided for the whole table is "Simon E. Davis, The Evolutionary Tree of Religion," which, judging from the sort of garbled and oversimplified nonsense cited to it, hardly seems even close to being a reliable source. --Katolophyromai (talk) 17:09, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

The table:

Evolutionary tree of mythology[edit]

Founding date approx. Belief system Adapted from Influenced by
100,000 BCE Animism
15,000 BCE Shamanism (Proto-Nostratic) Animism
12,500 BCE Middle East Shamanism Nostratic faith
3,500 BCE Proto-Indo-European Polytheism Shamanism (Proto-Nostratic) (15,000 BCE)
3,000 BCE Canaanite Polytheism Middle East Shamanism Mesopotamian polytheism (4,000 BCE)
2,500 BCE Indo-Iranian Polytheism Proto-Indo-European Polytheism (3,500 BCE)
2,000 BCE Greek polytheism Proto-Indo-European Polytheism (3,500 BCE) Egyptian polytheism (3,000 BCE)
1,100 BCE Zoroastrianism Indo-Iranian Polytheism (2,500 BCE)
950 BCE Judaism Canaanite Polytheism Zoroastrianism (1100 BCE), Atenism (1348 BCE)
100 BCE Gnosticism Greco-Roman mystery cults (750 BCE) ← Greek polytheism (2,000 BCE) ← Proto-Indo-European polytheism
33 CE Christianity Judaism Mithraism (70 BCE), Gnosticism (100 BCE), Zoroastrianism (1100 BCE)
620 CE Islam Shi'ite, Sunni Judaism Christianity
1054 CE Catholicism Christianity
1517 CE Protestantism Catholicism

AsherahGoddess (talk) 21:52, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

Reliability of sources should be judged based on the reputation of the publisher and/or the author. In this case, I see no indication that the source meets the requirements of WP:RS. Eperoton (talk) 00:39, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
Ok. I won't put it into the article now but it's a nice table anyway. 188.147.230.141 (talk) 07:55, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

Removed material not about myth[edit]

From the section "Mythical Themes and Types", I removed material about the Eucharist, atonement theology, transference of evil (original sin), and witches. There are several different academic definitions of "myth," but they all agree that a myth is a story. To be appropriate for this article, a topic must meet at least one of two criteria: (1) it is specifically a traditional Christian *story* or (2), even if it isn't a story, a reliable source explicitly applies the term "myth" or "mythological" to it. As far as I can tell, the material that I removed meets neither criterion. The Eucharist is a ritual, not a myth. The belief in the atonement is a theological concept, not a myth. If the subsection on the atonement were reworded so that it explicitly focused on the *story* of Christ atoning for humanity's sins, framed as such (that is, as a story), then the subsection might be okay. The story of the transmission of original sin is indeed a traditional Christian story and, hence, a myth, but the article should either (a) frame it more clearly as a story or (b), better, cite a reliable source that explicitly connects original sin to the more general mythological theme of transference of evil and labels transference of evil as a "mythical" or "mythological" theme. There are indeed traditional stories (myths) about witches, but a discussion of medieval beliefs about witches, rather than stories about them, is out of place here. —Phatius McBluff (talk) 20:48, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

@Phatius McBluff: Thanks for discussing this in talk. I didn't notice this message at first. I agree with your criterion. However, the very first section you removed, Sacrifice, does cite a source which discusses the Binding of Isaac under the rubric of myth. So, unless the cited source is badly misrepresented, it looks like your edit didn't quite apply this criterion. For the sections where the cited sources don't establish the connection to myth, I suggest we tag the section with Template:Off_topic, and give other editors some time to consult other sources which may establish the connection before removing them. Eperoton (talk) 03:29, 1 August 2020 (UTC)
@Eperoton: Sorry for the late response. Good point about the Sacrifice section! I must have removed that part by mistake, because I didn't mention it in my comment and I agree that it should stay. In fact, I remember contributing to that section back when I regularly edited this article. As for the other sections that I removed, my personal editing philosophy (such as it is; I'm no longer a regular editor) is that any statement should be removed immediately if reliable sources do not explicitly tie it to the article topic. However, I think your edit is a good compromise for now. --Phatius McBluff (talk) 14:20, 23 August 2020 (UTC)
On further reflection, I can't think of any good reason to keep the sections that you tagged as possibly straying from the topic. Can you think of a reason? I'm stumped. --Phatius McBluff (talk) 14:26, 23 August 2020 (UTC)
@Phatius McBluff: This is in keeping with WP:PRESERVE. Even if the article doesn't cite RSs which tie those sections to the article topic, the relevance or irrelevance of those sections rests on subtle conceptual distinctions, and it's not inconceivable that such RSs exist. A maintenance banner can prompt other editors to look for them and verify this question. If no such sources come to light within a reasonable period, we should see if otherwise well-sourced content can be used to improve other articles, rather than simply delete it. Eperoton (talk) 02:35, 24 August 2020 (UTC)
@Eperoton: Fair enough. I was unaware of WP:PRESERVE. --Phatius McBluff (talk) 15:08, 24 August 2020 (UTC)
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